


Only My Ashes Will See the Sea

by calculatingMinutiae



Series: The Ghost of Glimwood Tangle [14]
Category: Pocket Monsters | Pokemon (Main Video Game Series), Pocket Monsters | Pokemon - All Media Types, Pocket Monsters: Sword & Shield | Pokemon Sword & Shield Versions
Genre: Gen, minor starkid black friday spoilers
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-03-06
Updated: 2020-03-06
Packaged: 2021-02-28 19:07:51
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,411
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/23042245
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/calculatingMinutiae/pseuds/calculatingMinutiae
Summary: Spikemuth, 2020.Allister and Marnie have a shared love of scary movies.
Relationships: Mary | Marnie & Nezu | Piers, Mary | Marnie & Onion | Allister
Series: The Ghost of Glimwood Tangle [14]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1576204
Comments: 4
Kudos: 50





	Only My Ashes Will See the Sea

**Author's Note:**

> "Is there some lesson to learn?/  
> Should I never have wanted?/  
> I never even got started/  
> Or were the decks always just this stacked?"
> 
> \- _Black Friday_ , Starkid's Black Friday
> 
> [Cover Art](https://2sp00ky.tumblr.com/post/611892772195237888/new-tgogt-is-up-though-this-time-its-mostly)

"Holy crap, mate, you alright?"

"Mmhmm," Allister hums through hitching breaths, trying desperately not to even come close to blinking. 

"Allister, it's a film. They're all alright once the curtain goes down." Marnie forces a reassuring smile.

"Yeah." He nods decisively, letting the tears loose to flow up in a halo around his head.

Marnie glances, maybe lingers a little long, but says nothing.

Mimi's stitches strain under the pressure of exactly how tight Allister is hugging her, but her actual body is unharmed. If anything, she's slightly impressed. A shadowy hand curls up from under the disguise to pat Allister's shoulder.

Marnie pauses the movie on an unflattering frame of the lead actor's face. Part of her split attention mentally files it away for meme material.

It takes a moment to gather his thoughts. 

"Yeah, I know. . . I just. Didn't think these movies could do that." 

"Do... what, exactly?"

"Make you feel for them, I mean. Usually, th, the scary ones are all about the monster... an' bad characters gettin' whatever might come to 'em. I wasn't ready for them to be people."

Marnie shifts her eyes away from the screen, simply looking to the spikes lining her jacket, the frilly pink dress beneath clashing against the leather.

"Like, real ones. That are all, complicated an' everything...."

Her eyes wander across the room they've set up in. Dingy blank walls are coated in shadow, save the light from the lonely fluorescent and flickering television. The box is older than she is, surely, some of her brother's sound equipment plugged in to make their movies more than slightly sub-audible. Allister insists on sitting on the floor close to the television set even in spite of the rickety leather seats adorned with cushions and blankets in anticipation of their little movie nights. There are even snacks loaded up in the cramped alcove of a kitchen, just within range of reach, hondew scones included.

"I dunno. 'S dumb, an' I know they're just there to show off how sick the monster is, but the way she talks about her lil' sister, even when she's about to die... makes me wanna text Bea. N-Not to come get me or nothin' but. 'Cuz. You know?" 

After discovering a mutual love of horror cinema, Marnie and Allister started having weekly movie nights. The two of them usually watch all the movies Piers shrugs and says he doesn't quite have the stomach for, a phrase Marnie has learned to interpret as 'Has no interest in and may, in fact, throw up as a result of'. (He has already decided that it's better she be exposed to some of the horrors of the world in her own home if she feels inclined to investigate, where she's safe and he's within distance to mediate. There's a lingering feeling that, for Allister, their preferred fare is often in poor taste, though he hasn't yet built up the heart to question the boy about it.)

She and Allister have the same morbid fascination with the special effects artistry and method behind the madness of slashers and haunted hill houses. It's less about the gruesome and grim than the _why, how_ someone creates a twisted vision and teams of people put time, money, and effort into making it seem real. Something is undoubtedly _human_ about the whole endeavor, for as many pokemon use their powers to assist in the process; to confront fear and the unnatural through crafting something, _creating_ something that makes you share in an experience with your own eyes. It's a direct staredown with the uncomfortable or ill-understood that, good quality or bad, long or short, realistic or fantastical, always ends the same way: a list of names, the names of people who cared enough to see things through, and the comfortable safety of a fade to black. 

There's a kind of catharsis in being able to confront the unspoken aspects of the world vicariously, through blood or metaphor or both. 

Allister might agree with her, were he not a touch distracted. Perhaps something similar can be said for indulgence in a crafted world where misfortune is something that only happens to somebody else.

It’s strange, really. Usually when she looks out the window at Spikemuth, she feels something two-doors-down from disdain at dilapidated streets and crumbling infrastructure. It’s her home, of course, but it is not without its problems. Most of Galar simply looks for those flaws in the wrong places, in its people instead of the systemic rot they live in, but Marnie has learned. She knows that the spines its trainers wear are not meant to aggress, but to protect the vulnerable. Spikemuth's gym trainers are some of the kindest, most considerate people she has ever met, towards people and pokemon alike. The dirty tactics of the dark type are more opportunistic than malicious, in a town where everyone wants to live and one’s worth is forcibly pitted against that of another for any hope of a ob or some meaning to life, or at least a way _out_ . Embezzled funds and floundering industry make for a town bent and beaten by each economic downturn of the region. Its gym leader, as all-powerful as he seems, struggles to maintain the status quo and dignity they still have left. The city is suffocating, suffocat _ed_ , a closed hallway with its walls caving in, and she is powerless to stop it. 

And the rest of the region calls _them_ monsters.

At times, there is no lifeline. There is no simple solution, or even a solution at all. Sometimes, when you want to cry, you would like to escape to a reality where the monsters are the stars of the show, where justice is real, and comeuppance is served. It’s not that simple. It is _never_ , that simple, no, but one can wish upon a star that one of these days, the weak and meek will be protected from the wicked even though they have nothing to give. If nobody else is going to do it, then she may as well try.

Most of the horror movies the two watch are not very good. They are usually genuinely pretty bad. Very bad, in fact, full of horrible people who say horrible things to one another and slowly serve as spectacle while the neglected and the downtrodden make a show of themselves. It is not so odd to see unusual sights, in a film full of surprises; it’s not quite so frowned upon to see the poor girl or the strong girl, nor is it to see them hold hands if the world is burning around them. Perhaps it comes in the guise of horror, riding the tidal wave of the ‘unnatural’, but it isn’t nothing. The people pouring parts of themselves into these films did not forget. They remembered. They are seen.

Nobody remembers Spikemuth. It is so easy for gym challengers to bypass the town entirely, what with its lack of dynamax or proper, elaborate, expensive stadium. But in the horror pictures? They remember. 

She looks at the paint chipping off from the window pane, spidering cracks in the concrete of the basement, and back to Allister, sitting there, _empathizing_ with one of the cattle aligned for slaughter. The _hunted_ are not meant to be real people, because in reality, really-real-not-B-movie-reality, they have lost that right. They have squandered the gift of sentience climbing their way to the top on the backs of other people, and not even to survive. For _fun._

She scoffs. 

"You ought to text your brother too, you know… bet he'd worry the same 'bout you." 

She sighs, pulling a blanket over her shoulders, finishing the last of the aspear scones. 

"Why? We live in the same house, cryin' out loud?" 

"I know… it'd be nice, 's all." 

She steals a glance back to the woman on screen, an unflattering face perhaps, but one crying, reconciling in the last moments before the shine drains from her eyes. When she clicks the film back on, the narrative takes a long aside, in slow motion.

_Did I need her more than she needed me?_

In stock silence, as the movie plays out, Marnie looks to the ceiling where Piers is undoubtedly sitting, practicing with his pokemon, standing guard in their little house on the corner. 

The movie plays out, and Marnie does not watch. 

"Yeah," she says, during a lull in the action. "Maybe I will."

**Author's Note:**

> "At first I didn’t know/  
> Why I cared/  
> Or why I wanted/  
> To hold her and rock her to sleep/  
> Did I need her more than she needed me?"
> 
> \- _Black Friday_ , Starkid's Black Friday
> 
> This wasn't going to be the next chapter but as an older sister [this song made me sob](https://youtu.be/1w5NQKf3InM). Whatever they're watching isn't literally Black Friday, but I wanted to carry over the themes of that scene because it Broke Me.


End file.
